Artist and cartoonist Laura Slobe at Mountain Spring Camp, 1950s, with other SWP members, from left: Tom Kerry, Carl Skoglund and Richard Garza. A Minority within a Minority Cannonite Bohemians after World War II By Alan Wald This essay is dedicated to the memory of George Lavan Weissman Perlstein, 1915-2009), a Pulitzer Prize-winning music theorist (1916-85), exemplary Marxist intellectual. “Friendship is born at and composer once married to the sculptress and painter that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I Laura Slobe (1909-58). Nothing written even hinted that these thought I was the only one.’” — C.S. Lewis two iconoclasts were in the past highly educated and com- THOMAS CARLYLE FAMOUSLY observed: “History is the mitted Marxists, or that revolutionary ideas oxygenated their essence of innumerable biographies.”1 If so, how does one cultural thinking at crucial moments. write a historical account of artistic rebels and sexual non- Alarm over memory loss of this type is the motive for conformists in the U.S. Trotskyist movement during the this present essay, which appraises the lives of Bloch, Perle repressive years of the early Cold War? An odd collusion and Slobe, along with others who sought a vexed amalgam of circumstances, including the hardening of anticommunist of unconstrained cultural creativity, personal freedom, and stereotypes and the self-censorship of radicals, caused a disciplined politics in the postwar Socialist Workers Party widespread memory loss that was acute on certain subjects. (SWP). What can be recovered of the political and personal Chronologies of world events and the recitation of “correct” passions of many “outlaw” lives on the Left, especially from political positions are no remedies; the emotional archeology those who infused anti-capitalism with anti-Stalinism, are only is what I am after. fragmentary narratives to be steered warily into coherency. Institutionalized forgetting about the scope of the Trotskyist For the postwar decade, one must write a kind of ghostly experience was on display in every venue following the deaths history, the reconstruction of the presence of an absence in a of Peter Rafael Bloch (1921-2008), an authority on Puerto time of persecution. Rican artistic culture, and George Perle (born George “Outlaw” Lives on the Left Alan Wald, an editor of Against the Current, is most recently author The late 1940s and 1950s was an era of growing right-wing of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Many thanks to “moral panic” about “folk devils” of communism and homo- those who offered critical suggestions in response to earlier drafts of this sexuality.2 The national mood, soon dubbed “McCarthyism,” essay: Howard Brick, Angela Dillard, Peter Drucker, Ursula McTaggart, reinforced the predisposition of socialist organizations to Christopher Phelps, and Bryan Palmer. promote a public, supposedly “proletarian” image of their AGAINSTAGAINST THE CURRENT THE CURRENT  25 members as conventional in appearance and behavior. time presence in the Trotskyist movement of sexual non-con- An example of the SWP’s earlier concern about the formists. Homophobia was everywhere, including the Left, and danger of alienating potential workers can be found in slow to slacken. The insinuation of a person’s homosexuality, the 1940 book The History of American Trotskyism, which accurate or not, was widely perceived as a slur upon the became required reading for members and sympathizers. In a accused. noted passage, party leader James At the same time, the historic ethos of the Left was P. Cannon (1890-1974) describes habitually performed as masculinist and hardboiled. how he opposed admission to Leaders set the tone by revealing little of their emo- the SWP of a long-haired man tions; dwelling on the private and intimate was discour- who walked around Greenwich aged as “not political.”4 While the actual love relation- Village with unusual clothes and a ships of Trotskyist militants traversed a continuum curious mustache: “I said, people from Puritans (who equated sex with heterosexual of this type are not going to be marriage) to reincarnations of the Bloomsbury Group suitable for approaching the ordi- (who shared multiple partners and sexual orientations), nary American worker. They are the ensuing silence about sexual nonconformity in the going to mark our organization Cold War Left became the dog that didn’t bark for as something freakish, abnormal, illuminating the movement’s affective life. exotic: something that has nothing to do with the normal life of the Institutionalized Forgetting American worker.”3 Using the pseudonyms “Trent Hutter” and “George SWP members, like participants Sanders,” Peter Bloch and George Perle were closely in most organized socialist groups, associated with the postwar SWP for at least 10 years became known for a conserva- each. The organization was called “Cannonite” after its leader (James tive appearance and a “clean-cut” Using pseudonyms, look, reflected in the photographs Peter Bloch (above) P. Cannon), mainly of activists as well as cartoon and George Perle from 1940 through drawings of the “working man” (right) were part the 1960s. Although of the bohemians there are parties, that appeared in its press. Yet as who contributed to this essay will show, conventional post-World War II groups, and individ- behavior in one’s personal life, or marxism. uals throughout the in artistic and cultural affinities, was world who to vary- an entirely different matter. ing degrees identify For many individuals, surface conformity began as with the Cannon politically strategic, an artificial demeanor to allow a legacy, not a word hearing from those who might be already suspicious was published in of revolutionary ideas as “outside” of and “foreign” to the left-wing press their culture. Then the Cold War atmosphere added about Bloch and intensified forms of state repression to the picture. Anyone Perle’s passing. who might be suspected of violating taboos had even better Nowadays it seems that the history of Trotskyism is far too reasons to blend into the environs or go underground. serious a matter to be left in the hands of “Trotskyists.” This neglect provided a strange contrast to the spectacu- Marxist cultural workers could have several lives; some- larly edited information appearing in the New York Times obitu- times they used different names for their political and profes- aries and other tributes, fulsome in praise but misleading by sional activity. For many militants, such secrecy turned out to gaps and omissions.5 No doubt Bloch and Perle were reticent be habit-forming; much was never recorded at the time, and or even cagey about their pasts, but it was the constraints of then it was forgotten. The exterior deportment became the historical amnesia that induced their admirers to fail to ask history, and with the passage of time the vision of the postwar basic questions about political and emotional allegiances that SWP became locked within a powerful stereotype — one not may have informed the two men’s cultural work. very attractive to young radicals today. Try to understand Beethoven, especially the Eroica sym- Decades after World War II, even when the temper of the phony, without reference to Napoleon and the French Rev­ country proved more hospitable to left-wing activism, familiar olution. Or Gertrude Stein, especially “Melanctha,” while expectations triumphed over the remembrance of anomalies ignorant of her relationships with May Bookstaver and Alice B. that might produce a rethinking. There was an understandable Toklas. About Bloch and Perle we were given less than half of reluctance among surviving radical veterans to “name names” the story: The striking correlations between historical events and provide particulars of former members of any Marxist and stages in their intellectual and artistic developments parties who had not gone public. After all, the Attorney passed unremarked. General’s List of Subversive Organizations lasted until 1974; One is asked to believe that a 40-year old German-born someone might yet end up in political “trouble.” Those who man named Peter Bloch materialized suddenly in the 1960s departed in the 1950s were sometimes dismissed as quitters as an authority on Puerto Rican music and art. Scholars and who succumbed to alien class pressures. journalists ascribe Bloch’s choice of topic, activities, and per- There was also a disinclination to acknowledge the long- spective to nostalgia for his European Sephardic heritage. No 26  JULY / AUGUST 2012 one noticed that Bloch himself relied on boilerplate radical originator of the L.A. Free Press and associate of Timothy Leary; language in his first book: “For the last 15 years I have been Marvin Garson (dates unknown), founder of the San Francisco actively involved in the struggle for the cause of Puerto Rican- Express (where he famously called for “Queer Power!” in Hispanic culture.”6 1969); Barbara Garson (b. 1941), author of “MacBird” (1966); Similarly, the acclaimed atonal composer and theorist Henry Spira (1927-98), pivotal figure in the animal rights move- George Perle is depicted as working out his ideas in isola- ment; and Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002), Greenwich Village folk tion from world events. At his desk or in front of a keyboard, and blues singer. Perle studied Vienna School composers Arnold Schoenberg The rumor that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (1874-1951) and Alban Berg (1885-1945), autotelically under- (1921-91) was once a follower in the SWP of the Argentine going a succession of eye-opening revelations about 12-tone Trotskyist/UFO enthusiast Juan Posadas (Homero Rómulo harmonic modes starting in the late 1930s. There seems to be Cristalli Frasnell, 1912-81) has never been confirmed.14 But a gag order against anyone’s speculating as to what may have obscured affinities between the Far Left and the far edges motivated Perle’s sequence of breakthroughs in theorizing of creative non-conformity are more present than extant post-tonal pitch relationships. narratives allow. For example, in late February 1935 James P. Did it never occur to anyone that Perle’s trajectory Cannon shared the speakers’ platform in San Francisco with resembles what scholars have noted about the break of the California Trotskyist Norman Mini (dates unknown); 15 Schoenberg with prevailing musical idioms? As Schoenberg’s years later, Mini, said by Henry Miller to be a combination of chief biographer reports, this pioneering direction was “not Franz Kafka and Big Bill Haywood, became a mentor of the just because of the logic of his technical development.” Perle’s visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82).15 idol was initially driven to work out his responses to his own emotional unrest, but by the 1920s he was living in the men- Heteronormativity and Trotskyism acing political environments of Austria and Germany. At that The defiance of sexual conventions can often be linked to a point Schoenberg’s “critique of the [musical] idioms in which defiance of social and political conventions. It is dicey to apply society expresses itself [became] a critique of society itself.”7 contemporary terminology to the pre-Stonewall era, but this The recycled fairy tale of Perle’s musical progression as the connection may explain why there was always a presence effusions of a romantic, isolated genius, calls to mind a remark of gays, lesbians and bisexuals in and around the Trotskyist by Thornton Wilder: “It is possible to make books of a certain movement. Most easily identified are writers: Claude McKay fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.”8 (1889-1948), Florence Becker (1895-1984), John Wheelwright (1897-1940), Parker Tyler (1904-74), F. W. Dupee (1904-79), and A Minority within a Minority Robert Duncan (1919-88). At stake in the recovery of this lost history are not just The poet and journalist Sherry Mangan (1904-61), a life- the three careers on which I am focusing, or the reclamation long committed Trotskyist who was more of the womanizing of a political model (the SWP), now mostly obsolete.9 Before type, was associated with many gay and lesbian artistic figures, recounting the Marxist chapters in the lives of Bloch, Perle including Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Alice B. Toklas (1877- and Slobe, one must address the milieu of a band of Cold War 1967), Mary Butts (1880-1937), Robert McAlmon (1895-1956), revolutionists of artistic achievement and non-conformist sen- and Maurice Grosser (1913-86), who painted Mangan in the sibility operating outside the parameters of prevailing social nude.16 conventions in their creative and personal stories. In July 1942, Mangan, who translated Mozart’s Idomeneo A cultural minority within a political minority, Bloch, Perle (1781) and other operas, brought his closest chum, composer and Slobe were among those who might oxymoronically be Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), who presided over a largely gay called “Cannonite bohemians,” forcing us to rethink familiar salon at New York’s Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street, down expectations.10 Some defied compulsory heteronormativity to the SWP headquarters. Mangan introduced James P. Cannon through non-conformist sexual orientations now said to have to Thomson, who straight away turned out one of his “musical been anathema in their own organization. Bloch, for example, portraits” of Cannon (called “Professional Revolutionary”), as was by all accounts a closeted gay man.11 Slobe was a bisex- he had earlier done for Mangan in 1940 (called “The Bard).”17 ual woman prominent in the SWP for her political cartoons George Weissman, director of the SWP publishing house after signed “Laura Gray.”12 1947, recalled that Lincoln Kirstein (1907-96), gay co-founder While I focus on the postwar SWP, offshoots and rivals of of the New York City Ballet, would come by the Weissmans’ Cannonite Trotskyism had a similar ambience when it came to apartment to call on Mangan, who stayed there between a conformist surface harboring a mixture of cultural and sex- sojourns in Europe and Latin America. ual rebels. Noah Greenberg (1919-66), founder of New York Some postwar Trotskyists were erotically free spirits in Pro Musica, and William Simon (1930-2000), a major specialist the earlier pattern of Maya Deren (1917-61), the avant-garde on sexuality and an early advocate of gay rights, were mem- filmmaker who was an active party member throughout most bers of the competing Workers Party (after 1949 called the of the 1930s. There were also “sex radicals,” attracted to Independent Socialist League) throughout the 1940s. In the the theories of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), an Austrian-born 1950s, the American Socialist magazine remained a source of psychoanalyst who used Marxism to argue that neuroses politico-cultural insight and inspiration, while Correspondence stemmed from the social order; his remedy, catnip to young newspaper, with its muse of C. L. R. James (1901-89), out- cultural rebels, was to increase one’s sexual potency. After stripped all for its focus on youth, women, and race.13 moving to the United States in 1939, Reich started building Then in the 1960s, celebrities emerged in the counter- boxes called “orgone accumulators” that he believed could culture with diverse Trotskyist pasts — Art Kunkin (b.1928), capture sexual energy from the environment. Reich’s patients AGAINST THE CURRENT  27 AGAINST THE CURRENT  27 sat inside these boxes, one of many unorthodox features of tionships. This included two leaders of the SWP in Southern his therapeutic treatment. California in the 1940s and 1950s, Murry Weiss (1915-81) and Although Reich was never a political follower of Trotsky, Myra Tanner Weiss (1917-99), who were also committed to a the two men corresponded in the early 1930s and may have policy of advancing women within the SWP. The Weisses, who held a meeting.18 Associates of Trotsky were much taken with sometimes strategized their love affairs for political reasons Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). — including one of Myra’s with Trotsky’s grandson — inspired a commune in Los Angeles. It was first known in the late 1940s Reichians on the Left as the “New England Street Commune,” but continued into Reich’s younger daughter, Lore Reich (b. 1928), became the mid-1950s under other names. an active member of the SWP youth group “International The trademark of the Weiss relationship, variously imitated Socialist Youth” as World War II ended.19 The artist and poet by others who were sometimes called “Weissites,” was an Jeanne Morgan (dates unknown), later a secretary of Cannon, inviolable political collaboration that was maintained even met Lore as a teenager at a Trotskyist summer camp in 1945, while the two conducted other heterosexual liaisons. Some of recalling her as “a large-boned, zahftig [Yiddish for ‘pleasantly these romances persisted for decades, most famously the 25- plump’] girl with glossy black hair, a smiling, happy person who year affair between Myra, who was three times the SWP can- was sophisticated and intelligent.”20 didate for vice president of the U.S., and the younger Henry Lore, close to New York SWP organizer Ray Sparrow (who Spira, who provided crucial Civil Rights movement coverage used the “party name” Art Sharon, 1915-85), acknowledged for the Militant under the name “Henry Gitano.”24 that she was the daughter of the famous Wilhelm, but rarely A few open partnerships in the SWP lasted until death, volunteered the information. Although Lore was studying such as that of George Novack (1905-92) and Evelyn Reed to become a psychoanalyst, she did not subscribe to her (1905-79), who were not “Weissites” but modeled themselves father’s views. Her husband Julius Rubin (1921-2004), later an on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Some of these economic historian at the University of Pittsburgh, was active couples eventually broke up, including the Weisses. In 1960, as well.21 By 1951, both had renounced Trotskyism and were following a stroke, Murry departed the SWP and ultimately expounding their own economic and political theories while became a therapist. This new career ruptured the centrality pursuing graduate studies. of his political alliance with Myra, who was also out of the Some members of the SWP, however, were piously devoted SWP but despised therapy, and Murry moved in with a young to Reichianism, while more were simply curious but not radical psychologist. convinced. Christy C. Moustakis (who used the “party name” A number of women in these non-monogamous relation- Chris Andrews, 1911-89) had served as a guard in the Trotsky ships were proud of their autonomy, speaking candidly of their compound in Coyoacán, Mexico, for 11 months. He was the “open marriage” late in life.25 But there were also grievances, son of Constantine Christou Moustakis (1883-1925), knighted privately expressed; the movement was still male-dominated, by the Greek government for his political services as a Greek- jealousy was not as easy to eradicate in practice as in theory, American. and professions of anti-bourgeois non-possessiveness could Christy had graduated from Staunton Military Academy serve as a mask for sexual bad behavior.26 and Bowdoin College, after which he received an MA in his- tory from Harvard University. He arrived in New York City in Factionalism and Narrow-Mindedness 1938, where he was recruited to the SWP by Joseph Hansen In other respects, too, life inside the radical movement (1910-79). In the 1940s Christy traveled around the United was never all puppy-dogs and rainbows. From its outset States showing films that he had made of Trotsky, then worked Trotskyism inherited a meme of organizational factional- for the Militant newspaper until 1945. ism that eventually rendered most self-proclaimed Leninist In a series of letters between 1951 and 1953, Christy, no parties fanatical cults, although Cannon’s was among the longer formally in the SWP after the latter date but still “least bad” of such groups. In 1943-46, George Perle bared sympathetic, discussed his experiences in Reichian therapy his fangs to join the attack of Cannon’s majority against the with Demila Sanders (1911-2006), who had accepted an small Goldman-Morrow tendency, an opposition that was the assignment in 1944 to assist in caring for Natalia Trotsky in more foresighted in its vision of the coming postwar world. Mexico.22 Christy described how he had commenced treat- Perle, writing as George Sanders (his mother’s maiden name), ment under the personal care of Reich in 1945, believing that was prompted to defend an orthodox dialectical materialism Reich had found “a shortcut breakthrough, available to the against Jean van Heijenoort (1912-86), a personal secretary to masses because it didn’t need the long, drawn-out treatment Trotsky who after 1949 became a world authority on math- of psychoanalysis.” ematical logician Kurt Gödel.27 Six years later, living in Reno, he was still reading Reichian In the early 1960s, Peter Bloch found himself in the middle publications, but baffled by Reich’s latest pronouncements on of a brutal fight in the SWP about the nature of the Cuban physics, astrophysics, medicine and mathematics. His interest revolution. Although he was not aligned with any of the oppo- switched over to hypno-analysis (the combination of hypnosis sitional factions, which were marked by an excess of sectari- and psychoanalyis), and he eventually moved to New York City anism, he was as “Trent Hutter” denounced by his chief U.S. where he worked as a proofreader for the New York Times.23 patron, Joseph Hansen, as having fallen into a “cesspool.”28 Paradoxically, it was sympathy for the early Cuban Revo­ Trotskyist Communes lution that paved the way for the 1963 reunification of the Other Trotskyists were practitioners of communal living Fourth International, a world organization of Trotskyists, and and open, non-possessive and, occasionally, group marital rela- Bloch himself would play a noteworthy part in the promotion 28  JULY // AUGUST 2012 of this new confederation. After Hansen’s death, 15 years later, practices was “security” — a belief that homosexuals were it was in part over the assessment of the Cuban Revolution susceptible to being blackmailed into informing. Inasmuch as that the SWP degenerated into a circular firing squad, all but evidence is very slight of any alarm at the time over potential unrecognizable today. blackmailers, such prohibitions were more likely motivated Factionalism, among other shortcomings, breeds narrow- by ignorance and a dread of difference.34 Expressions of the mindedness, judgmentalism (the inclination prejudiced belief that homosexuality is a to make quick moral and personal judg- sign of social decadence, and a view that ments about those who seem different), potential working-class recruits would be and a view of others as instruments for alienated by a gay presence, were known immediate political objectives. Often fac- to exist in the SWP.35 tionalism combines with the Anaconda of political orthodoxy, which kills creativity Mystery Figure and autonomy by constriction. A narrow-minded atmosphere may A factional environment can also be a be a reason why Peter Bloch was never breeding ground for interlinked bigotries fully integrated into the U.S. Trotskyist masked by an alleged concern for revolu- movement; he will always remain a some- tionary purity and a “proletarian” policy. what opaque individual, a “mystery fig- Program and orientation are foundational ure,” in the 1950s.36 A precise appraisal for a socialist movement, but a factional of anyone’s sexual orientation can be a mentality transforms Marxist terminology convoluted affair, and Bloch was particu- into a name-calling (“reformist,” “centrist,” larly secretive about his. Distinctive in his and “petit-bourgeois” are the most famous) appearance was only that he was thin and more likely to produce a proletarian “mys- frail, suggestive of a small bird.37 tique” than an effective presence in the Beyond the speculations of close working class. friends, all we really know is that he No particular individual may have been lived in Uptown Manhattan where his to blame, but the postwar SWP, frequently life revolved around his mother, Else factionalized, was to some degree infected Israel Bloch, “for whom his attachment by the homophobic, sexist and racist soci- surpassed ordinary filial devotion.”38 They ety in which it functioned. It is accordingly shared an apartment from their arrival in necessary for historians to develop a frame- 1949 until her death in 1988; she is the work acknowledging “intersectionality” in only person with whom Bloch acknowl- the Left as well as elsewhere in society.29 edged an affectionate relationship, except Many of these manifestations only became George Perle, musical revolutionary. for Louise Fölsche (1864-1945), Else’s clear in the changed cultural climate of later nanny and companion since the 1890s. years. Around 1969, for example, many of us who had recently Bloch’s father, an eminent Jewish medical researcher hung by joined the SWP as New Leftists were stunned by the surfacing the Gestapo in 1943, is scarcely mentioned.39 of evidence of the party’s unwritten policy against member- Since Bloch was a refugee, he needed to operate with ship for homosexuals. How this rule developed has yet to be some political caution. His status, before and after he gained fully explained.30 citizenship in 1955, would be endangered if he were a known To be sure, in the 1930s there had been leaders believed associate of Marxist organizations in the U.S. or previously in to be gay; one was Grant Cannon (?-1969, no relation to Europe. Yet he did not go fully underground. “Trent Hutter” James P. Cannon), a prominent Trotskyist in Ohio, and another was treated as a party member by others in the SWP; he was Thomas Stamm (dates unknown), who broke from the received and wrote for the SWP Internal Bulletin, occasion- Trotskyist movement in 1935 to form the Revolutionary ally gave lectures at events sponsored by party branches, and Workers League.31 SWP founder George Breitman (see foot- taught classes Mountain Spring Camp, a piece of land in New note 4) recalled to me that homosexuals had been members Jersey where SWP conventions were held.40 Faced with both and served in the leadership of the Newark SWP in the 1930s 1950s compulsory heterosexuality and anti-radical repression, and 1940s; as branch organizer, he considered the matter of some of his personal reticence may have been because he their sexual orientation of no importance.32 feared a fate such as that of Oscar Wilde, who was tried and After World War II, however, the situation apparently imprisoned for indecency. devolved. One former SWP assistant branch organizer, Phil Did Bloch’s SWP writing express a “gay sensibility”? Sexual Clark (1921-92), told me that he had been forced out of his identities are far too diverse to share a single responsiveness; position in Manhattan in the late 1940s when a young worker sweeping generalizations are dubious. Bloch, however, articu- complained to national leaders that Phil had made a pass at lated many views that certainly challenged the predominant him. Phil described how he subsequently met with George heterosexist orthodoxies of the Left. One surprise was his Novack, who recommended, with intellectual hauteur, that promotion of the writing of W. Somerset Maugham (1874- he temporarily resign and get “cured” by a Freudian psycho- 1965), a popular and highly-paid English author who resided analyst.33 in exile in the United States. Maugham lived openly with male It was later explained that the reason for such exclusionary companions but was circumspect about directly address- AGAINSTAGAINST THE CURRENT THE CURRENT  29 ing his homosexuality. I am not aware of any other Marxist film of 1953, “Little Fugitive,” about a child alone at Coney endorsements of Maugham, whose writings were skewered Island.46 At the same time, Bloch wrote prolifically on Leon a few years ago in an attention-grabbing essay by one-time Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, William Faulkner’s A Fable Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens.41 (“A Revolutionary Novel”), Soviet music, Gerhart Hauptman’s In “W. Somerset Maugham plays (he was a supporter and the Social Question” of homosexual and trans- (1960), Bloch published a long gender rights in pre-Hitler defense of the artistic achieve- Germany), and books and ment of Maugham in the SWP’S films about the Nazis.47 International Socialist Review In 1983, in answer to my (ISR, no relation to today’s inquiry as to whether he journal of the same name had revised any of his earlier published by the International judgments, Bloch responded: Socialist Organization — ed.). “I still believe in most or Bloch even characterizes nearly all of what I wrote Maugham’s 1938 The Summing in the Trent Hutter reviews; Up as “one of the 20th centu- but I seem to remember ry’s most admirable books of that in one article I took a wisdom.”42 somewhat critical view of His argument is that Cecil B. deMille’s work; and the “personal philosophy” this is something that was revealed there is “related to obviously based on insuf- Marxist materialist thinking,” ficient knowledge; for a few and that Maugham’s first work years later I realized that he of fiction, Liza of Lambreth was a master of the monu- (1897), is “a pioneering one mental type of film epos, in the field of the modern an artist and a man with proletarian novel.” As a regu- deep religious convictions lar contributor to the same who wanted to be an edu- journal a dozen years later, cator through the motion 48 I was so intrigued by the picture.” boldness of such claims that I Looking through Bloch’s initiated a correspondence to post-Trotskyist writings, Painting by Laura Slobe (date unknown). which Bloch responded with from the mid-1960s until his enthusiasm. death, one finds an obvious continuity despite the additional focus on Puerto Rico; many In 1960, Bloch’s views on Maugham caused some SWP of the issues and themes characteristic of Trent Hutter are eyebrows to be raised, but more startling to readers of the reiterated in new contexts with politics reconfigured from his Militant, Fourth International and ISR throughout the previous Trotskyist years.49 decade was the tenor of his articles on American musical the- ater, then in its heyday, and Hollywood films.43 Bloch was par- A Marxist Education ticularly taken with musical plays, some of which were being As a semi-clandestine revolutionary in the 1950s, Bloch made into films that had evolved from old “musical comedies” was a completely political person well-versed in Marxism, of the U.S. stage. In contrast to most on the Left, who con- although he mainly wanted to write cultural articles. In these sidered almost anything from Broadway or Hollywood to be years he simultaneously published as “James Parker” for the commercial fluff, Bloch saw these works as vital and original Belgian Far Left paper La Gauche. His connections with the cultural achievements. Fourth International date back to the immediate postwar era According to George Weissman, editor of the Militant, in Belgium when Bloch met Ernest Mandel (1923-95), another there emerged for this reason a general anger against Bloch’s Jew born in Frankfurt, whose Resistance activities had landed “lousy movie reviews,” and many SWPers who attended his him in the Dora concentration camp in Germany. classes at Mountain Spring Camp came precisely to express According to research cited in Jan Willem Stutje’s recent their objections. Bloch was taken aback and hurt by what he biography of Mandel, Bloch during his U.S. residence became found to be a tendency to judge art by “political line.”44 Yet the chief conduit of information between the SWP and the he remained adamant in his writing: “The motion picture…is International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the the art form of the masses of our time….Contempt for light organization from which the Cannon’s followers had officially entertainment is foolish.”45 departed in 1953.50 Although Stutje refers to this role as an Among the Hollywood productions that Bloch especially “open secret,” it is one difficult to reconstruct as Bloch later admired were George Cuckor’s 1954 “A Star is Born,” with decided to eliminate the entire Trotskyist phase of his life Judy Garland; Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 “An American in Paris,” (about 15 years) from the autobiographical materials he dis- with Gene Kelley; and Gene Kelley’s 1952 “Singing in the Rain,” seminated.51 When providing information about Mandel for also featuring Kelley. He esteemed a low-budget independent Stutje’s biography in 2002, Bloch still insisted on protecting his 30  JULY / AUGUST 2012 identity by being cited as “Karl Manfred”—a minor character reverberations of shaping attitudes acquired during the Great in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Torn Curtain” (1966).52 Depression and World War II. At some point in the 1950s, Bloch began taking trips to Raised as a Jew in Germany, and from a distinguished medi- Puerto Rico, on occasion with his mother, and he befriended cal family on his father’s side, Bloch was drawn more to his a cousin of the Puerto Rican radical poet Julia de Burgos mother’s family’s Spanish ancestry. As a student in the 1930s, (1914-53). Spanish was one of the four languages in which he in Germany and England, he had felt torn apart by the Spanish was fluent, and he placed a premium on his mother’s “Spanish- Civil War, characterizing his position as “not neutral but Jewish” (a term he preferred to Sephardic) heritage.53 One impartial.” Disgusted by the violence on both sides, he expe- might wonder if his attraction was encouraged by his political rienced an attraction to the conservative cultural traditions of connection with the International Secretariat, which, led by the Right, and the need for stability, but he also identified with Michel Pablo (Michalis N. Raptis, 1911-86) and Mandel, became the suffering of the poor. increasingly “Third Worldist” with a focus on North Africa During World War II, Bloch was drawn into the Resistance and Latin America. By 1960, Bloch came to his own theory of in Belgium, where his family was in hiding, and in Switzerland, Puerto Rican economic development, believing that a substan- to which he escaped under a pseudonym. But his politics were tial transformation was underway and that it could no longer less internationalist than adamantly pro-Allies; he displayed a be considered a mere U.S. colony. bust of Winston Churchill in his apartment and for the rest According to Stutje’s research, Bloch was quite favorably of his life expressed strong affection for the ideas of Charles inclined toward the SWP and anxious to assist in its smooth de Gaulle.56 reunification with the United Secretariat. The main problem Bloch did not jettison such earlier views when he was was the SWP’s tendency toward dogmatism and political sec- recruited to Trotskyism by Mandel, just as did he not turn tarianism, especially evident in its polarizing attitude toward explicitly anti-Marxist when he became militantly anti-Castro. the writings of Isaac Deutscher. But Bloch maintained friend- Following his separation from the SWP, he remade his past, ships with a circle of SWPers with whom he felt at ease. claiming to have been only a journalist for European publica- These were chiefly with the editors Weissman and Hansen; tions. He next launched a career in popular Spanish-language party members who were aficionados of classical music, such papers in New York, especially arts columns in Nueva York as Art Preis (1911-64) and Ethel Preis (?-1966); and artists such Hispano, América Illustrada, and Canales. He also promoted as Laura Slobe. concerts, poetry readings, and exhibits, and worked with radio and television. Privately he continued to admire Trotsky as a “Danger Signals in Cuba” “political genius,” and he traveled to Germany to lecture in What happened in 1961 is not entirely clear. When both the public schools on his holocaust experiences. SWP and the International Secretariat responded favorably to Then came an astonishing development in 1969: Bloch was the first stages of the Cuban Revolution, Bloch encouraged awarded a Spanish Knighthood in the Order of Isabella the reunification in his communications with Mandel. En route Catholic for his activity on behalf of Puerto Rican culture. to a decisive meeting in California in the summer of 1961 After this he declared that he was “a friend of Spain” and 57 with Cannon to discuss the implementation such a develop- “always shall be grateful to Franco….” The statement is ment, Mandel made a clandestine stopover in New York to be mind-boggling in light of the Spanish fascist’s record of brutal- coached by Bloch, who paid his expenses. ity, including the deliberate execution of 20,000 supporters of the Republic after his victory. Yet Bloch had in late 1960 submitted an essay to the Yet somehow Bloch was not totally deradicalized. He International Socialist Review on Puerto Rico that was rejected, maintained his opposition to the Cold War policy of the West and a subsequent meeting with the SWP leadership on the and characterized the United States as an imperialist country. matter resulted in further estrangement.54 In the spring of He was also an anti-Zionist who was opposed to Israeli poli- 1961 Bloch circulated a widely-discussed article in the SWP cies. During the time we corresponded, his strongest politi- internal bulletin, “Danger Signals in Cuba,” arguing that Cuba cal identification remained with European social democratic had entered the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat newspapers, where he felt he had the freedom to say what (i.e. had become “a workers state”) but was rapidly degener- he wished. 58 ating to Stalinism due to the lack of the working-class political democracy advocated by Marx and Lenin. The Serialist Hansen rebutted Bloch by claiming that his arguments The political radicalization of George Perle, a major theo- were essentially “lifted” from the U.S. “State Department,” a rist of serialism (the method of composition associated with formulation unlikely to promote a warm future relationship.55 Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique), was more conventional than That seems to have ended all official contact with the SWP, that of Bloch. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, of a Jewish immi- although Weissman arranged a brief reunion between Bloch grant family that was cultured but financially insecure, Perle and Mandel in New York in 1967. lived in Chicago until the mid-1920s and then on farmland in Political pressure from society and history surely impinge northern Indiana. on character and the intimate spaces of the self, and there Perle’s genius for music was apparent at age six or seven are individualized ways in which a multifaceted person such as when he sat down at a piano obtained for his sister. The com- Bloch was affected by the atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s. position he played by Chopin made sense to him and he knew Bloch’s post-Trotskyist evolution in political and cultural that he wanted to write music. Soon he was commuting to thinking was sui-generis. Like his reviews of musicals, films, and Chicago for lessons. novels, it withstands all pigeonholing, although one can find Perle started attending DePaul University at the height AGAINST THE CURRENT  31 of the Great Depression and was radicalized by the time he received his degree in 1938. He next moved toward Trotskyism while obtaining a Masters of Music at the American Conservatory of Music. He joined the Chicago branch of the SWP in 1942, the same year that he finished the degree. In these years Perle, still known as Perlstein, was tall, wiry and slender, a darkly handsome man with strong-looking shoulders, high cheekbones, and an ascetic aura.59 The stages of Perle’s musical development link to political moments in the late 1930s and after, although it would be simpleminded to claim that a growing attraction to Marxism and Trotskyism explains his art. It was in 1937, following a period of pessimism and disorientation, that Perle initially connected with he called “the revolutionary direction in 20th century music represented by the Viennese,” and in 1938 he wrote his first atonal piece.60 After 1939, with the onset of the war in Europe, he took his first lesson with refugee composer Ernst Krenek (1900-91) and realized that he was developing a consistent theory of diatonic music. In August 1940, the same month Trotsky was assassinated, Perle wrote three important piano pieces using the 12-tone row system, a groundbreaking departure from the diatonic scale. In 1941, on the cusp of joining the Trotskyists, he pub- lished his first scholarly essay on the theory of atonality. Three years later, in his political writing for the SWP, he explained that his understanding of musical tones was originally made visible through the Marxist dialectic, although this claim did not appear in his academic publications (which he cited as Laura Slobe (Laura Gray), vanguard artist and proletarian cartoonist. evidence).61 Between August 1943 and February 1946, Perle served in Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Wind Quintet, a masterpiece of the army, mostly overseas in Europe, the Philippines and Japan. symmetry, and also a MacArthur Fellowship. Relocating to New York City with his wife Laura Slobe, he In a September 1982 personal interview, Perle told me that used the G.I. Bill to started Ph.D work at New York University the primary problem he faced in the SWP was the pressure in Medieval and Renaissance Music Studies. In the New York he felt around proletarianization. There was no SWP policy branch of the SWP, he was an activist who also participated obligating members to go into industry, and not everyone was in arranging fund-raising, sometimes by playing concerts with asked, but the attitude of certain SWPers was that one would violinist Seymour Barab (b. 1921), and where he wrote under never be a full-fledged member without factory work.64 After the name Sanders for the Fourth International.62 he accepted his teaching position in Kentucky, Perle decided Like Schoenberg, who arranged singing groups of workers, to switch his status to that of sympathizer. Perle established a chorus of SWP members in New York, Gradually he drifted away from the SWP and maintained people with no particular musical education. After rehearsing contact only through his former wife, Laura, from whom he and then performing traditional radical songs such as “Drill, Ye was legally divorced in 1952. Upon her death he completed Tarriers, Drill” (1888), Perle arranged to cut a record for use one of his most noted works, “Quintet for Strings” (1957-58). at party functions.63 Dedicated “In Memory of Laura Slobe,” it was a composition In 1949, Perle started teaching at the University of for two violins, one viola and a cello. The piece is remembered Louisville, where he also composed and in 1956 finished up today for its repetition of a stark cry without any answer. his doctorate. In April 1951, as his ties with the SWP were For Perle’s later career, one might speculate that a ver- loosening, he heard a transformative performance of Alban sion of Trotsky was artistically reincarnated as he theorized Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1914-22) in a New York Philharmonic increasingly revolutionary breakthroughs in music that could concert directed by Dimitri Mitropoulos. By the late 1950s, be passed on and understood only by a small circle of for- Perle began to be recognized as the premier scholar of Berg, ward-looking people: “the revolution in the language of music eventually the subject of a two-volume work. But his academic embodied in the works of Schoenberg, Berg, and [Anton] writing actually arose out of his composing — it just got pub- Webern in the early years of this century was not merely a lished first. cultist self-centered tendency that could have no significance During the 1960s, teaching at the City University of New for musical culture in general. They solve the perennial prob- York’s Queen’s College, Perle progressively broke with the lem of operatic form in a new and unique way, integrating tradition of Schoenberg and the 12-tone method; in his view, it characteristic self-contained pieces that recall the classical had become academic and he wished to remain avant-garde. In ‘number’ opera within an overall cyclic and recapitulative 1973 he produced what he considered to be his first mature design whose unity and scale are comparable only to the work in post-diatonic music. In 1986 Perle was awarded a most impressive achievements in literature.”65 Perle appears 32  JULY / AUGUST 2012 still to be using dialectics in his developing estimation of the Chicago area until 1944. By this time, Slobe was regarded as Vienna School. mostly a sculptor who also did some paintings. Through her The political evolution of Bloch and Perle after their SWP association with a circle of other avant-garde artists inclining years was not merely an instance where the promise of epiph- toward Trotskyism, she met George Perle, whom she married any gave way to disillusionment. Their cultural beliefs advanced in 1940. in the 1940s and 1950s in association with revolutionary In 1942 the young couple joined the SWP in Chicago. Marxist ideas and activism, each partaking of the other, with Within a few weeks, Laura was assigned to assist with a frac- some vision of socialism persisting. But their relationships to tion of workers in the auto industry, and began drawing car- the SWP turned out to be uncomfortable; they could not find toons for the shop paper. The branch organizer, Art Preis, rec- their way forward within it. Bloch was on the defensive for ognized her talent at once and encouraged her to submit to his open-minded views, and Perle concluded that his music the Militant. After a visit to New York in January 1944, her first (regarded, perhaps unfairly, as cerebral) was not what was cartoon appeared on March 4, and thereafter almost weekly. wanted from him.66 Later, in separating from the SWP, the Eventually the number of cartoons totaled around 430, mostly two men translated the intellectual and moral fervor of their treating subjects such as the War Labor Board, the No-Strike radicalism more exclusively into the art world. Pledge, the murder of Emmett Till, and unemployment. They would be reproduced in Trotskyist and labor publications in Sophisticated Lady 20 countries. Perle’s former wife, Laura Slobe, died suddenly in 1958 at Moving to New York with Perle after the war, Slobe age 49. The SWP’s Militant newspaper immediately memori- did increasingly less avant-garde alized “Laura Gray” as “heroic” and “beloved,” an accurate art and sculpting while she held reflection of her stature as the staff artist. SWP leader Art on-and-off jobs painting manne- Preis called Slobe “the greatest political and social cartoonist quins and creating window display of our generation, ” and talked of her devotion in selling the art for department stores. She party newspaper in all weather at plant gates.67 eventually lived in a one-bedroom Slobe’s cartoons surely deserve scholarly attention; they apartment near 14th Street, with are naturalistic and powerful, in the tradition of the Masses’ clippings, tear-sheets and sketches Boardman Robinson, and warrant comparison to artists such fluttering on the white walls.72 For as Hugo Gellert and Robert Minor. Sometimes her rugged- commercial reasons, she produced a Siamese cat image that looking male workers resembled men whom she knew from she cast in duplicates. political work.68 But all was compromised by her precarious health. At age But Slobe herself never judged her cartoons to be serious 22 she had been stricken with tuberculosis, requiring bed rest art, and women in the SWP were fascinated by her for quali- for two years. In 1947 one of her lungs was removed. As she ties beyond proletarian rectitude. Jeanne Morgan wrote an struggled through the Cold War years, the longing to return unpublished memoir of Slobe that began by recalling a 1945 to her avant-garde art — “the grotesqueries that you can discussion of younger women in the SWP about “Who is the make real” — became a haunting apparition.73 Then in early most sophisticated woman in the Party?” The answer was 1958 she was diagnosed with pneumonia that rapidly turned Laura — for her look, manner, and style. With pale skin and fatal. light brown hair “in a corona of curls,” she presented herself Of her personal life, only sketchy information remains. In as a “gentle Bolshevik…giving no quarter to others’ needs regard to the break-up of her marriage to Perle, all that Slobe for a proletarian style and disguises.” Of interest to Morgan would say was: “Just because you love somebody does not was also Laura’s rhinoplasty; the shape of her nose had been mean that you can live with them.”74 Subsequently she had enhanced to produce “an exquisite long, straight, fine line pro- affairs with both women and men. For several years in the late file” through plastic surgery. 69 1940s and early 1950s she tried living with Duncan Ferguson Born of a wealthy Jewish family in Pittsburgh, she had a (1901-74), also a sculptor in the SWP who was deeply frus- mother who was a terrible, dominating woman.70 A prodigy trated in his career.75 who entered the Art Institute of Chicago at age 16, Slobe Her closest female friendship toward the end of her life began exhibiting two-dimensional paintings at age 19, then was with Ethel Bloch (no relation to Peter Bloch), who joined had a one-person show at the Art Institute of Chicago and the SWP in 1943 at age 19. One year after Slobe’s death, Ethel in several galleries. Her sparse and incisive style immediately married Arthur Lobman, after which she was known as Ethel brings to mind Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. In the late 1930s Lobman, and both remained SWP members until their deaths she began showing the avant-garde sculpture for which she four decades later. became better known; “Vanity,” a 1935 carved plastic figure, was a much admired modern interpretation of a classic theme Gender, Desire, Intimacy and can now be seen on-line. 71 The Institute still has a Laura For those who see radicalism as an ongoing tradition, Slobe Memorial Prize in Sculpture. there remain huge gaps in our knowledge of personal lives. Slobe subsequently worked at the federally-funded Illinois The biographical study of many postwar activists is partly an WPA Sculpture Program from where she was “loaned” out exercise in speculation because institutionalized forgetting has to art centers in other states. This ended in October 1940, obscured research. In particular, the disappearance of cultural when she had to be removed from project roles due to a dissidents and sexual non-conformists from memory was rule that 18 months of continuous unemployment was the induced by the needs of the dominant cultural optics (liberal, maximum. Nevertheless she continued holding exhibits in the neo-conservative, post-modernist) as much as by the Left’s AGAINST THE CURRENT  33 fixation on political programs and idealized precursors. “bohemianism” often connoted rebellions that celebrated marginality and lacked a vision of mass social transformation such as the SWP advocated. Too many of yesterday’s maps have now outlived their 11. Such opinions were expressed to Wald during personal interviews with George usefulness, especially in their political coding. This is part of Weissman, 8 March 1983, and Ernest Mandel, 2 June 1984. 12. This was stated empathetically to Wald in an interview with Demila Jenner, 17 July the reason why questions asked about sexual resistance to 1981. “Bisexual” was the term used by Jenner to describe herself, Laura, and one other heteronormativity are so frequently linked to the recovery of woman in the SWP. new knowledge about inventive cultural work. 13. For a discussion of Correspondence, see Rachel Peterson, “Correspondence: Journalism, Anticommunism and Marxism in 1950s Detroit,” in Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Gender, desire, and intimacy Lang, eds., Anticommunism and the African are just some of the pressing American Freedom Movement (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 115-160. For The American fresh categories essential for cor- Socialist see: http://www.marxists.org/his- recting “enforced forgetting” as tory/etol/newspape/amersocialist/index. htm. There are other political currents as one looks back on Bloch, Perle, well. Christopher Phelps discovered an Slobe, and others discussed in essay on “Socialism and Sex” in a 1952 copy of the Young Socialist (issued by the this essay. One method of chal- youth group of the Socialist Party), and lenging institutionalized memory published an informative commentary on loss about the Left is to raise the document and the subject in 2008 in both The Journal of the History of Sexuality queries about “bohemians” (sex- and New Politics; the latter version is avail- ual and cultural non-conform- able on line at: http://newpolitics.mayfirst. org/fromthearchives?nid=100. ists) in unexpected places. The 14. The claim was discussed in several point is not to reveal any “secret places, including: http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/swp_usa/message/11501. histories” but to compel con- 15. Mini is described in Henry Miller, Big Sur temporary socialists to more and the Oranges of Hieronymus Beach (New York: New Directions, 1957), 61. Cannon fully consider the actuality of discusses his sharing the platform with predecessor efforts. Mini in a letter of 25 February 1935 to A. J. Muste; I am grateful to the antiquarian What is required for a bookseller Walter Goldwater (1907-85) for Marxism for the 21st century is sharing this with me. a cultural anthropology of the 16. See my dual biography, The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Left, a recreation of the ambigu- Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan (Chapel Hill: ous texture of the free-form University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 17. Both are listed in Thompson’s works, plots of lived radicalism and the on-line at: http://www.virgilthomson.org/ sometimes-crooked paths of worksfiles/portraits.PDF. 18. See the discussion of the relation- its politics and culture. If older ship in Christopher Turner, Adventures in frameworks continue to explain the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution and therefore contain the his- Came to America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 186-90. tory of the Left, the legacy of 19. In the 1940s and 1950s there was no emancipatory socialist politics national youth group of the SWP; clubs of young SWP supporters in different cities of 60 years ago is more likely to used various names. “International Socialist perish. § Youth” was used in New York, and “Socialist Youth Club” in Los Angeles. Notes 20. Undated letter from Jeanne Morgan to 1. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1891) was a Scottish Wald, probably 1983. satirical writer of history and social commen- 21. In a letter of 21 May 1980 to Wald, tary. The quote is from “On History,” available Weissman described Lore Reich as close to at: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/ Sparrow and said that both she and Julius Best/CarlyleHistory.htm. Rubin were active members for several 2. A “moral panic” refers to intensity of feeling years. on the part of a population about issues that 22. Demila was originally married to sculp- are felt to threaten the social order, an apt tor Duncan Ferguson, an SWP member description of the “Red Scare” and “Lavender who shared the assignment in Mexico, Scare” of the 1950s. Sculpture by Laura Slobe (date unknown). and later in life she was known as Demila 3. James P. Cannon, The History of American Jenner. Trotskyism (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 92. 23. Letter from Christy Moustakis to Demila Sanders, 18 March 1952, courtesy of Demila 4. George Breitman (1916-86), longtime SWP leader, observed that Cannon’s reluctance (Sanders) Jenner. Demila reported back to Christy on her adventures among many fel- to reveal the personal was no different from that of other Trotskyist leaders of his gen- low travelers of Reichianism, some Trotskyists and others not, and described a meeting eration such as Max Shachtman, Martin Abern, E. R. McKinney and Carl Skoglund: “the with Reich’s older daughter, Eva Reich (1928-2008). Eva Reich can be viewed on Youtube: style of that time, before 1960, was quite different than after. People in general, not only http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU3wNgrxLwc. those in the movement, did not discuss personal things ‘publically.’ It was considered 24. Letter from Nora Ruth Roberts to Wald, 4 March 1995. See Peter Singer, Ethics into politically out of order or a sign of weakness, except with those with whom you had Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement (Boston: Roman and Littlefield, 1998), intimate relations.” Letter to Wald, 19 July 1985. for more details on Spira’s activities. 5. Sources for obituaries and tributes can be found on the Wikipedia entry for Bloch 25. Myra Weiss did so at Murry’s memorial meeting, according to a 3 January 1995 letter and the Homepage for Perle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rafael_Bloch, and to Wald from Nora Ruth Roberts. http://www.georgeperle.net. 26. All of the personal interviews and correspondence with women cited in this essay 6. Peter Bloch, La-Le-Lo-Lai: Puerto Rican Music and Its Performers (New York: Plus Ultra, make references to these sorts of issues. 1973), 16. 27. See George Sanders, “Another Answer to Comrade Loris [van Heijenoort],” Internal 7. Malcolm MacDonald, Schoenberg (New York: Oxford, 2008), 12, 25. Bulletin (New York: Socialist Workers Party) V, no. 4 (October 1943): 11-15. 8. From a famous letter to Gertrude Stein, 16 September 1933, Edward Burns, ed., The 28. See Joseph Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuba Revolution (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 122, 124. 143. 29. “Intersectionality” is the term in feminist sociological theory for a methodology of 9. For an analysis of the complex causes of the transformation of the SWP, see: Alan Wald, studying social inequality in which these three forms of oppression interrelate. For a “A Winter’s Tale Told in Memoirs,” Against the Current #153 (July-August 2011), available break-through study along these lines relevant to the subject of this essay, see W. Chris at: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3317. Johnson, “Sex and the Subversive Alien: The Moral Life of C. L. R. James,” International 10. The terms are unlikely to have been joined together openly at the time, inasmuch as Journal of Francophone Studies 14, No. 1 & 2 (2011), 185-203. 34  JULY / AUGUST 2012 30. Historian Christopher Phelps has been researching the topic for several years. Bloch insists: “The writer who is worthy of our respect has to be a non-conformist.” 31. In a 27 June 1990 interview with Wald in Ann Arbor, B. J. Widick expressed certainty Peter Bloch, “The Unreliable Writer,” Unveiling Cuba (November 1983): 8. that Grant Cannon’s sexual orientation was widely known in the Trotskyist movement. 50. See the review of Stutje by Wald: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2383. The belief that Stamm was gay is mentioned in a number of places, including a letter from 51. Bloch went so far as to insist that his decision to write for Trotskyist publications George Breitman to Wald, 14 March 1985. in the 1950s was based merely on whether they would give him a dignified platform, not 32. Letter from George Breitman to Wald, 14 March 1985. due to any political allegiance. 33. Yet Breitman wrote me on 14 March 1985 that he was skeptical of what Clark 52. Jan Willem Stutje, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso, 2009), recalled about Novack’s role. Also see Patrick Quinn’s obituary for Clark in Against the 104. Current #40 (September-October 1992): 49. Quinn reports that After World War II “the 53. Bloch can be seen in a Spanish-language interview on Youtube: http://www.youtube. organization [SWP] requested a number of its gay members to resign.” com/watch?v=h4vsa2tz8K0. 34. In a letter from George Breitman to Wald, 14 March 1985, Breitman insists 54. George Weissman to Wald, 13 February 1983. that he never heard any leadership body in the SWP discuss concerns about 55. Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution, 122. homosexuals as members or blackmail targets until the late 1960s. David Thorstad, 56. These and similar views are expressed in long letters from Peter Bloch to Wald on an expert on the SWP and homosexuality, maintains that there was no policy of 17th August 1983 and 5 November 1983. A 1 October 1983 letter from Ernest Mandel to excluding gays for security reasons until the late 1960s. See: http://archive.org/details/ Wald confirms that Bloch had been pro-Ally. GayLiberationAndSocialismDocumentsFromTheDiscussionsOnGayLiberation. 57. Peter Bloch letter to Wald, 17 August 1983. 35. References to these attitudes in both the Canadian and the U.S. movements can 58. Peter Bloch Letter to Wald, 5 November 1983. be found in the section called “The Gay Question” in a document online: http://www. 59. Letter from Jeanne Morgan to Wald, 15 July 1983. Perle legally changed his name in socialisthistory.ca/Docs/History/Raphael-1960-Trotskyism.pdf. 1949 . 36. Letter from George Weissman to Wald, 13 February 1983. 60. George Perle, Perle on Perle: The Composer Recalls His life in Music in an Interview by 37. Ibid. Bloch even referred to himself in this manner; see memoir cited in footnote Dennis Miller (Englewood, New Jersey: Music Association of America, 1987), 8 39. 61. See George Sanders, “Another Answer to Comrade Loris [van Heijenoort],” Internal 38. Ibid. Bulletin (New York: Socialist Workers Party) V, no. 4 (October 1943): 11-15. 39. The major source for his family history is the diary and memoir, When I Was 62. George Sanders, “Joseph Stalin, Music Critic,” Fourth International 2, no.9 (March-April Pierre Boulanger: A Diary in Times of Terror (New York: The Poet’s Refuge, 2002). The 1948): 56-7. volume contains photographs his mother, Louise Fölsche, himself, and a half-dozen other 63. Letter from Jeanne Morgan to Wald, 15 July 1983. individuals, but none of his father. 40. “Danger Signals in Cuba” was one such contribution to the Internal Bulletin; see 64. I reported on the interview in an 8 October 1982 letter to George Breitman; the Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuba Revolution, 120. Hutter was described as “an SWP member” purpose was to arrange a longer meeting in New York City, on which I failed to follow at the time when some of his private correspondence about the Fourth International through. In her letter of 15 July 1983, Jeanne Morgan wrote of Perle: “He resisted the was published in The Struggle to Reunify the Fourth International (1954-63): Volume IV (New ‘proletarianization policy’ of the 40s and 50s and continued his career as a musician York: Education for Socialists, November 1978), 83. Hutter’s other public appearances are rather than going into a factory.” mentioned in a letter from George Weissman to Wald, 13 February 1983. 65. George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg, Volume One, Wozzeck (Berkeley: University of 41. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/05/hitchens.htm. California Press, 1980), xiv. 42. Today this book is out of print and usually not considered among Maugham’s 66. The question of cerebrality in Perle’s music is debated in Leo Kraft, “The Music of significant works, except as autobiographical source material. See Trent Hutter, “W. George Perle,” The Musical Quarterly 57, no. 3 (July 1971), 444-465. A number of perfor- Somerset Maugham and the Social Question,” International Socialist Review 21, no. 3 mances of Perle’s work can be viewed and heard on Youtube: http://www.google.com/ (Summer 1960), online at: https://epress.anu.edu.au/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol21/ search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=George+Perle+youtube&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8. no03/hutter.html. 67. See Art Preis, “Laura Gray — Socialist and Militant Artist,” Militant, 20 January, 1958, 1- 43. In a 19 August 1956 letter from Joseph Hansen to Duncan Ferguson, controversy 2. Four years earlier James P. Cannon wrote a tribute to Slobe as a cartoonist, reprinted about Hutter’s reviews is cited. In a 27 October 1957 letter from Ferguson to Hansen, in his Notebook of an Agitator (New York: Pioneer, 1958), 334-37. Trent’s political assessment of Maugham is described as “farcical.” 68. Fortunately, Kent Worcester, an authority on cartoons, is currently researching a 44. Letter from George Weissman to Wald, 13 February 1983. study of her work. 45. Trent Hutter, “The Workers’ stake in Bourgeois Culture: A Socialist Looks at Art,” 69. “Laura Gray,” Jeanne Morgan, 15 July 1983. Fourth International 17, no. 1 (Winter 1956); online at: http://www.marxists.org/history/ 70. Letter from George Weissman to Wald, 10 October 1981. etol/newspape/fi/vol17/no01/hutter.html. 71. http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/art/htmls/de_ms_slobe.html. 46. Trent Hutter, “The American Motion Picture Today: What Unions Can Do To Get 72. Letter from Jeanne Morgan to Wald, 15 July 1983. Better Movies,” Fourth International 16, 1 (Winter 1955); online at: http://www.marxists. 73. Letter from Laura Slobe to George Perle, 3 January 1958. org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol16/no01/hutter.html. 74. Jeanne Morgan to Wald, 7 July 1983. 47. George Novack often edited these essays, but only stylistic changes — to de- 75. For a detailed study of Ferguson’s life and art, see Alan Wald, “Sculptor on the Left: Europeanize the use of pronouns and so forth — were made. Duncan Ferguson’s Search for Wholeness,” Pembroke Magazine #19 (Spring 1987): 32-57. 48. Letter from Peter Bloch to Wald, 17th August 1983. This was reprinted in Wald, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist 49. This is particularly obvious in a 1983 essay called “The Unreliable Writer,” where Traditions in Cultural Commitment (1992; paperback reprint, 1995).

AGAINST THE CURRENT  35